-
Outlook 2013–Contacts View
I have been using Outlook 2013 for few months now & I love it. Initially I didn’t see anything different from Outlook 2010 other than “Metro”fication of the User-Interface & In-place replies. People Hub After reading about it in Office Blog, I enabled the social integration features. WOW, these features are cool. Basically it allows you to connect your Outlook to social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & SkyDrive). Doing this allows you to see additional information including Pictures of people in your Outlook contact list. These include people who may not be connected to you directly but have provided their profile photo for Public access. It also shows “What’s New”…
-
Outlook 2010–Synchronization Log
If you are using Microsoft Outlook with either Exchange Server or Office 365, you may at times see few emails titled “Synchronization Log” as Unread mails. I have been getting this for years now and it is a known harmless issue and can be safely ignored. If like me having Unread mails bothers you, you can do this simple fix. To correct it the user needs to customize the search folder as following: – Go down to Search Folders – Context click on the “Unread Mail” folder and choose “Customize “Unread Mail” – Click on Browse – Unselect the checkbox for “Search subfolders” – Select manually all folders you would…
-
Experience with Exchange Server & Office 365
As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner at Vishwak Solutions, we have been using the Microsoft Exchange server as our Mailing, Contact & Calendaring solution for many years. Till last year we have been running Exchange Server On-Premise, this meant having at least 4 servers, uninterrupted power, redundant connectivity and so on. Though Exchange is the best solution for this workload, it is still a lot of work from a management perspective, especially since we are less than 100 users. Having tried out earlier the alternatives (Linux Mailserver, Google Apps and others) I feel Exchange Server & Outlook really improves team productivity. So earlier this year, we moved to Office 365…
-
Writing diacritical marks in MS Word
Today in my Yoga class my Yoga teacher approached me with a problem. He is writing some Sanskrit slogas with Latin Characters in MS Word and he is not able to get the diacritic marks, like the apostrophe or dashes on top of an English letter or below a letter. An example is below of what he is trying from an old Yoga textbook: Coming home I contacted my good friend Murasu Muthu Nedumaran, an expert calligrapher who instantly pointed me to the answer. The trick is to use what are called as Combining Marks in Unicode. Below are the options on how to do it. Option 1: In MS…
-
War of words between Google & Microsoft on MS Office Collaboration
Two weeks back Google announced a product called “Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office” with the below video. This free product helps Microsoft Office (Windows application) users to collaborate (share, backup, simultaneously edit Word, Excel & PowerPoint). Last week Microsoft has replied back in kind with the below video. Microsoft has been offering its own collaboration using its on-premise offering of Microsoft SharePoint Server or on the cloud with Office Live Workspaces (or SkyDrive) or SharePoint Online. There have been many discussions in the Blogosphere why is Microsoft doing this, are they threatened or they are feeling comfortable to come out in open. Whichever is true I find this to…
-
SharePoint 2010 Productivity Tour in Chennai
Today I gave a talk in the SharePoint 2010 Productivity Tour that happened in Vani Mahal, Chennai. I have been to Vani Mahal many times in the past for watching Stage plays, Classical Music programs or Dance programs, so being on that stage and doing a technical presentation was a little odd to begin – but once on stage I got used to it. Needless to say, the acoustics and lighting were good and I just wished the LCD projector could have displayed any resolution higher than 800×600! The topic was “The New World of SharePoint 2010 Architecture & Administration”. The product is exciting with new features that I decided…
-
MS Word “Mail Merge” to rescue – customized emails
Background: Tomorrow marks the beginning of the World Classical Tamil Conference in Kovai and with it the Ninth “Tamil Internet Conference” (TI 2010) organized by INFITT. I am honoured to be the Chair of INFITT for this term and to be part of the TI 2010 organizing committee. Tonight we wanted to send emails to participants and speakers (who may not have got the information yet) of TI 2010, informing them about the Hotel and the Room Number they are booked in Coimbatore. And we had to do it in the next few hours (it was already 11.50 PM when we started) and I am in my Hotel Room along…
-
Forward emails with Exchange/Outlook even when you are away
The other day one of my colleagues asked me how he can have emails from a distribution list sent to him, go automatically to certain people even when he hasn’t downloaded the emails in his MS Outlook client. A server-side rule can be set up by the individual in their own MS Outlook client itself. Here are the steps I gave him. Launch Microsoft Office Outlook, Select “Tools” Menu Select “Rules & Alerts” Option Press “New Rule” Button Select “Start from a Blank Rule” -> “Check Messages when they arrive” Check “Sent to People or Distribution List”. Then at the bottom (Step 2), click on the blue link “People or…